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Dublin soccer

"Hopefully I can keep going here and there’s a couple more years left in me.

"I was out of the game for the best part of 18 months so it was tough getting back into it.

"It wasn’t as if I was doing nothing, I was trying to get back and trying to overcome injuries, going all over the world to train.

"But the actual day to day of training with a match every week, it probably took the first few months to get back into the swing of it.

"My body held up pretty well, the actual injuries I had then didn’t pop up again so in that sense it was good.

"When I came in I hadn’t got a pre-season under my belt so the first part of the season was to get training and get fit. When I played, I thought that I did OK."

O'Brien is ambitious about what next season can hold for Rovers, who finished in third place and with Europa League football secured - but ... points off the pace set by title winners Dundalk.

"Next season, first and foremost we need to start well," he stressed.

"That was the thing we alluded to as a squad throughout the whole season.

"The first 10 or 15 games wasn’t good enough.

"There’s a few little things that we need to nail down. You could even break it down to the first eight games of the season, it’s a massive part of it because you get a feel as a squad where you’re at and where you’re going to be.

"Looking back we dropped a lot of points to teams that finished in the bottom three in the league - and if you want to be up in the top part of the table you can’t really be doing that”.